Transforming Your Business // Part Two:

Adopting a DevOps Culture

lthough digital transformation offers boundless possibilities for growth and value creation, it comes with its own set of IT challenges. A common source of friction between development and operations teams is the need to accelerate software delivery while maintaining system stability. The development team is measured on the updates they deliver to users while operations is measured on the health of the system.

What Is DevOps?

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.

DevOps may be just the catalyst IT teams need. In a this environment, the entire team is responsible for delivering both new features and stability. Instead of simply creating code and turning it over to an operations team to put into production, responsibilities are balanced more equally, with procedures in place to make sure both teams have insight and visibility into application performance.

Not surprisingly, the practice continue to gain in popularity. According to data from DevOps.com, the adoption rate increased substantially from 2015 to 2016, from 66 percent to 74 percent.

To keep pace with market demands, IT teams must build, test and release software in ever-faster cycles.

What’s driving the shift? Long lead times to get software into production make it difficult for companies to provide cutting-edge services and enhance the customer experience. To keep pace with market demands, IT teams must build, test and release software in ever-faster cycles.

Why you should consider adopting a DevOps culture
Today’s business challenges have pushed traditional delivery approaches to new levels. Here are seven reasons why you should consider adopting this culture:

Accelerate Innovation
With an integrated operations and development team, applications can be developed and deployed much more rapidly. This is vital, since business success today hinges largely on an organization’s ability to innovate faster than the competition. Since change sets are smaller, problems tend to be less complex. Engineers can take advantage of real-time performance data to quickly grasp the impact of application changes. And software fixes are faster because team members only need to check the latest code changes for errors.

DevOps Benefits

What benefits have you seen or do you anticipate seeing from implementing DevOps in your organization?

Improve CollaborationRather than attempting to eliminate the difference between the two disciplines, DevOps seeks to build a bridge to make them work better together. The software development culture becomes focused on combined achievement rather than individual goals. When software and operations teams trust each other, they can experiment, research and innovate more effectively. It’s no longer a matter of tossing application code over the wall and hoping for the best. The development environment becomes progressively more seamless as all team members work toward shared goals.

Increase EfficiencyAutomated tools and standardized production platforms—key elements of this environment—help make deployments more predictable and free IT staff from tedious repetitive tasks. With automated testing and integration, developers no longer need to spend large chunks of their day waiting for machines to be configured or code to be integrated. Acceleration and development platforms offer additional opportunities for improving efficiency:

Scalable infrastructure, such as cloud-based solutions, help speed testing and deployment processes by increasing access to hardware resources.

Compilation and development tools help shorten development cycles and speed product delivery.

Continuous delivery workflows can help produce faster and more frequent software releases.

Reduce FailuresThe shorter development cycles associated with this practice promote more frequent code releases. With these more modular implementations, teams can expose problems in configuration, application code and infrastructure earlier. DevOps also keeps team members engaged throughout the life cycle of a feature or application, resulting in higher quality code. Fewer fixes are required because developers look for and eliminate potential problems as they write code. According to a recent State of DevOps report, organizations that adopt this culture experience a 5 times lower change failure rate when deploying code.

Accelerate Recovery TimeBecause deployments are more targeted and isolated, bugs are easier to spot and in turn, fixes are often faster and easier to implement. The team often only has to check the latest code changes for errors to be able to resolve the issue. Resolution times are inherently faster because the responsibility for troubleshooting and fixes remains contained within a single team. In fact, research shows that high-performing DevOps teams recover from failures 168 times faster than lower performing peers.

Why Adopt DevOps?

The DevOps model can be very beneficial to your organization. If implemented correctly, this can lead to faster resolution times, less development complexity and a more streamlined software delivery process. From an cultural perspective, this model can increase team productivity, raise employee engagement and provide more employee development opportunities.

Enhance Job SatisfactionRather than rule-based or power-based culture, DevOps promotes a more performance-based company environment. This reduces the bureaucratic obstacles and fosters sharing of risks. The result is a more contented and productive workforce, which helps boost business performance. Developers and operations engineers tend to prefer this environment because they can work more efficiently and wear more than one hat. They gain a better understanding of where their role fits into the larger scope of IT, and the business. This makes them more marketable and more valuable.

Gain a Competitive EdgeFast software delivery is crucial in today’s digital age, and a DevOps culture is the driver of this process. It allows businesses to accelerate go-to-market services and roll out new features out quickly and efficiently.